


Tonight's Entertainment

by orphan_account



Category: Chicago (2002)
Genre: F/F, Femslash, First Time, Future Fic, Post-Canon, over 1000 words
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-09-19
Updated: 2003-09-19
Packaged: 2017-10-02 14:19:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the trial, after the success, Roxie wants a fresh start, with a fresh past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tonight's Entertainment

\-- FIRST NUMBER: VANITY HOP--

Roxie held the newspaper an inch farther, squinting at the blurring letters. She didn't know why she was suddenly getting far-sighted - it was hardly fair, she was only thirty-two (twenty-five if anyone asked). She'd die before she'd wear glasses in public, that was for sure.

She glanced at the mirror, sideways from the bed she was sitting on. She sure didn't look like a grandma. Her back was straight as an arrow; she could see the shadows of muscles down her back in the half-lit hotel room. Not a whit of extra fat on her - her belly was hollow like a starved cat's, she made sure of that. Velma had taken to calling her skinny, chicken-legs, flat - fair enough, she supposed, considering how Roxie never let her get away with a single treat without a jab.

And here was Velma now, eyes painted a slightly smudged black, and those carefully embellished lips in a half-smile, looking at her through a double angle of two mirrors. "I've got Charlie's old reading glasses in a trunk somewhere, I think."

Roxie gave the mirror a catty glare and threw down the newspaper. "Oh, should I get them for you?" she said sweetly. "You seem to have missed a couple of pounds your put on, there."

Velma rolled over on her bed and stretched out on her back, arms thrown over her head, legs swivelling up, the hem of her purple skirt hitching up. Nothing but flawless new stockings these days. Roxie turned away. Velma was a creature of controlled movements, unfazed composure - she never lay about or stretched lazily on a bed - unless she was performing.

They both were - it was like a choreography, half improvisation, half tired old routine. All that was missing was the glitter and the roar of the audience.

"Rox, old girl - there's nothing to be ashamed of," Velma purred, her shoeless foot sliding up and down one calf, beat, turn, stretch. "It could be our new thing - the sexy girl and the bookworm."

"Hmm, you know it might work. We could use that navy blue dress I wore at the trial." Turn, leg over knee, beat. "But how will we ever fit you into that?"

Velma gave a throaty laugh and rolled over on her stomach. "Oh, you've gotta be kidding me. You, sexy?"

Roxie was taken aback. Of course she was sexy. Wasn't she?

"I'm the sexy one," Velma purred. "You're the cute one."

Roxie hated being flustered, but she was. She tried to answer, but no words were quite strong enough, so she stood up and paced to the mirror and back. SHE was the sexy one. She was the one who played and flirted, didn't she? What did Velma do? Scared everyone away, that's what.

She stopped to look into the mirror - funny round face that was always going to make her look fat no matter how thin she got. Velma's laugh still echoed in her ears; it sparkled like electricity in the back of her neck and shimmied merrily down her spine. It was a remarkable laugh, in so many ways.

She hated to admit it, but Velma might have had a point. She was the cute one. The polite one with good hygiene.

You could never be thin enough. Or rich enough. Roxie lay a hand on her hard, hollow belly.

Perhaps she'd have a caramel tonight. Or a slice of pie - just one.

-

\-- SECOND NUMBER: MS. ROXIE HART, IN HER SOLO RENDITION OF A DUET --

There was the sharp sound of a coin clattering down stone stairs. It echoed through the empty hallways. To Roxie, it seemed like the emptiness wasn't just confined to the hallway; at the moment, the whole world was void.

She drew her knees together and closed her eyes, huddling against the railing at the top of the stairs. She could hear the hum of traffic outside, but that seemed so far away and so inhuman that it did nothing to lessen her sense of solitude.

Solitude... the word felt like a serpentine baby spring in a grove behind a chicken farm, leaping over rocks and grass, with the clarity of fresh country air. She wanted to lean over and dip her hand into the icy water and feel it streaming through her fingers.

Then she heard a door open and two voices mix with the momentarily heightened clamour of traffic, somewhere down where the stairs ended, and in a moment a breeze drifted up to where she sat, blasting cool Chicago air on her thin stockings. The spring vanished from her mind. Instead the familiar excitement started to kindle in her belly, warming her, and she got on her feet to welcome Johnny and Velma and the key.

Tonight they'd give a swell show.

...and she was up there, blinded by the limelight, deafened by the orchestra, sweat pouring down her back, and she'd stomp down and grind her hips and fall against Velma, back to back, moist skin on moist skin, moving, swirling, counting, in

perfect

unison.

The stage was white, the light was white, their skin was white, and their dresses and the darkness were black as sin. Simple, the contrast, under the heat of the lamps. She didn't look into Velma's eyes closely enough to see they were warm brown, or think about walking bare-footed through Mr. Wilson's farmland in early summer before the grain began to grew.

But later that night when she lay freshly scrubbed and slightly aching on a strange bed in a new dark room, she knew she had started to remember. She clutched her pillow and squeezed her eyes shut and soon, blessedly, exhaustion would pull her thoughts into sleep.

-

\-- THIRD NUMBER: TANGO INFRANGIBLE --

It might have been power that she'd wanted, or sex, or maybe it was just both of them wrapped up in a neat flesh package with earth-brown eyes hiding behind black smudged make-up and sequins.

She thought of a snake's nest she'd seen in a faded biology book from the attic where her uncles' had slept throughout their childhood, the yellow paper so different from the glossy covers of pulp books now littered on the nightstand in each new hotel they moved to, and the tight coiled knot of living flesh so bendy and so close that she could not tell where one creature ended and another began. She had wondered if even the snakes knew that, and what it would feel like to never be cold, or to only live when the sun shone bright and warm on her back.

Velma couldn't stay put, couldn't sleep in the same room for three nights in a row, strangely flitty for such a rock, such a slow-moving powderkeg, her hands like iron, a robot's inhuman strength twining around Roxie's wrist. Velma could never bend, not like that, not wrap herself up into anything. But she had legs and arms, and Roxie wondered if there was some way to soften her, to find her yielding and animal enough to knot with.

But for the moment, she would settle for Velma hard and unyielding as well. Her knuckles hit the wall painfully as Velma pinned her wrists together over her head, and the leg that pushed between her thighs was like warm iron. She could smell the gin in Velma's breath, and her head spun slightly, still full of flashing lights and questions like "were you hospitalized" and "do you know where your husband is". Her lips twined in a smile.

"You haven't had me fooled for a second," Velma said, words slightly slurred, the dull drunken sheen of her eyes making them look almost soft, and Roxie was happy of the whiskey she had had herself (for her the hotline to memory was always colour), and then Velma pushed her leg up and the moment itself trickled into sudden rainbow pleasure. Roxie started to lurch, and Velma caught her around her waist, pressing her lips against hers, and Roxie discovered that even stone had places where they were soft and pliable and moist.

-

\-- CLOSING NUMBER: JAZZ --

"Do you remember all those things I said at the trial?" This conversation had been playing through her mind since early morning (or noon, as it might have been to someone else), and she just couldn't contain it anymore.

"You mean that stuff about a baby?"

"Yeah, and all the rest - being raised in a convent, eloping, being seduced by jazz and liquor?"

Velma chuckled and stroked the small of her back, pushing up the silk negligee to spread her fingers wide over bare skin. "That last part was true enough, though, wasn't it?"

"Yes, but..." Roxie had no patience for joking; the topic was burning her tongue and she needed to spill it out. She curled up closer to Velma on the bed, one arm across her belly. "What if it was all true?"

"What do you mean?" Velma was frowning, but losing interest; Roxie could see her mind wander towards the telephone.

"What if I had been raised in luxury, and lost everything when my parents died? What if I had lived in a convent--" She could hear the dripping of water somewhere in a fancifully Spartan stone convent, and mornings sitting in rows by long tables with other girls in identical grey dresses - and hardly even realised she was remembering Cook County Gaol. "...And fell madly in love with Amos..."

Velma laughed again. "Amos! God, how did you ever end up with a man like that, anyway?"

"He wasn't that bad!" Roxie said, suddenly defensive. "I don't know if anyone's ever loved me like he did. That's not a small thing, you know."

"Yeah - and you treated him like shit, babe," Velma said with a crooked smile. "You're better off with me."

Roxie couldn't contest that. Velma's attention still wasn't in satisfactory alignment with what Roxie was trying to say, though, as evidenced by the fact that her mouth was now on Roxie's throat. Roxie felt her desire stirring, but forced the beast down, taking Velma's hands in her own and kissing them instead. Velma sighed, not really very placated by the kiss. "Okay," she said. "So you ran away from the convent to marry your knight in shining armour."

Roxie continued, delighted. "Yes, and for a few years it was - well, not perfect, but we had each other."

Velma snorted. "And you didn't sneak into nightclubs to watch painted Jezebels and their shameless sinful jazz, I take it?"

"No - I did!" Roxie said, feeling safe enough for now to snuggle closer to Velma, and even drape a leg over hers. "And especially you, of course. I'd see all your shows if I could. I couldn't tear my eyes away from you, and when I got home and went to bed with Amos I'd be thinking of you all along."

"Now this story's getting interesting," Velma said with a grin, and Roxie realised that the leg thing had perhaps been a mistake, as Velma pulled her closer.

"And then there was a man..."

"Fred Casely."

"See, Amos wasn't enough anymore, and obviously I couldn't have a woman to lie with, so he'd come home with me and 'burgle' me with all his might. And I'd lay in bed drunk and woozy and think about you while this strange, jealous, violent man screwed me silly..."

Velma was back to kissing her neck, and damn her for knowing just what Roxie's weak spots were. Almost involuntarily she hitched her own leg up, and taking the cue Velma slipped her hand between them and transformed Roxie's attempts at continuing her story into cries and babbled pleads.

Roxie didn't care anymore. She needed to finish the story but it could wait; that need was easily swallowed into the quicksand of another. Her hands and lips searched out the wet warm parts of Velma even as clever fingers continued to coax the eager beast.

Later, the flush was all over her, and she was much too drowsy and comfortable to talk. She lay immobile, tangled up in an already sleeping Velma, a spark of coherency on the back of her mind reminding her she'd been a willing accomplice in putting a stop to her musings.

If she had continued, she would have said, "What if he had reached for the gun?"

She closed her eyes, the smell of sex and sweat on her, and dreamt her past anew.

-

\-- YOU HAVE BEEN A WONDERFUL AUDIENCE --

"Girls all had short hair when I was young," Roxie said.

"I know, Nanna," answered Maude, her attention wondering towards the gauze-draped window.

"You look like a high-born lady or a country pumpkin who's forgotten to braid her hair."

Maude giggled. "I never wear braids! Nobody my age does."

"Oh, girl, someday it might be the height of fashion. I know, I've seen it change often enough."

It was quiet and still in her house, even when Maude visited to do the housework and receive her generous pay for the service. Perhaps it was the drawn curtains. Roxie couldn't remember when she'd grown to prefer the slow and the gloomy. She smiled at herself from the wall, frozen in a pose almost fifty years ago. The woman in the photograph would have thrown the windows open and blasted music as loud as she could till the neighbours complained. Or so Roxie seemed to remember.

But the grey and the brown were such nice colours. They went well with the photographs.

Maude left a little before two. Roxie, as straight-backed as ever, drew the gauze aside to watch her go. She bounded on top of her bicycle and raced down the street, bare legs flashing in the sun. Roxie could tell it was her by the bright orange shirt and the green shorts, though her outline was fuzzy. Like everything else, these days.

Roxie felt for the latch in the window, and tried it. To her surprise, it opened easily, and she pushed the window open. The air was pleasant, and smelled of the half-rotten apples from her garden. She walked over to the old record player, and fished out an album. Another click or two, and she could hear herself. Fifty years ago. She smiled.

Hell. There was life in the old girl yet.

Roxie danced.


End file.
